Landscape Ecol (2010) 25:1459–1460
DOI 10.1007/s10980-010-9503-0
BOOK REVIEW
Redwoods, real and imaginary
R. Widick: Trouble in the Forest: California’s Redwood Timber Wars.
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, USA. 2009, 360 pp. illus.,
maps; 21.6 cm. Cloth, ISBN 978-0-8166-5324-9, US$25.00; Paper,
ISBN 978-0-8166-5325-6, US$25.00
Diana Stralberg
Received: 17 April 2010 / Accepted: 11 June 2010 / Published online: 24 June 2010
Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
Trouble in the Forest by Richard Widick gives a
scholarly review of the conflict-plagued north coast
redwood region of California—a sociological analysis
of the ‘‘redwood imaginary’’ as it has been experi-
enced by three distinct groups: Native Americans,
loggers, and environmental activists. The common
thread is capitalist greed disguised as private property
rights, with the local and global media playing a large
role in spinning the story. This is not bedtime reading.
It is a dense, academic dissertation containing many
interesting historical nuggets for the factually-minded.
Unfortunately, it is overburdened with impenetrable
sociology jargon that makes it more or less inacces-
sible to the casual reader—and, unfortunately, to most
landscape ecologists.
The 42-page introduction provides a comprehen-
sive overview of the book’s thesis and the key events
(most of them violent) that have shaped the ‘‘redwood
imaginary’’: the Wiyot Indian massacre in 1860, the
killing of striking loggers in 1935, and, more recently,
the 1990 car-bombing of activists Darryl Cherney and
Judi Bari and the 1998 accidental logging death of
activist David Chain, who was crushed by a falling
tree. Widick describes a conflict between capitalism
and humanity with roots ‘‘as deep as the nation itself.’’
This conflict is anchored in the American notion of
private property rights, recently accelerated by the
D. Stralberg (&)
PRBO Conservation Science, Petaluma, CA 94954, USA
e-mail: dstralberg@prbo.org
advent of globalization. For the Headwaters forest, it
was the 1985 takeover of Pacific Lumber by the
Maxxam Company that prompted a radical response
by activists, and this is a cornerstone of the book.
Widick chronicled these protest events, symbolized by
Julia ‘‘Butterfly’’ Hill and her two-year-long ‘‘Luna’’
tree-sit. The introduction lays out these core compo-
nents of the book, and the author’s intent to ‘‘combine
the cultural theory of social imaginaries with elements
of media studies and environmental sociology’’ to
explore the roots and broader implications of the
‘‘timber wars.’’ In this he probably succeeds, although
not without some redundancy.
The first two chapters provide in-depth theoretical
treatments of the ‘‘signature events’’ of the modern
protest movement. Chapter 3 explores the role of the
company town, Scotia, created by Pacific Lumber for
its workers as an early model of corporate citizenship
that helped ally workers with the company’s economic
interests. Chapters 4–6 provide a ‘‘social history’’ of
several distinct periods marked by episodes of vio-
lence that shaped the region: the late nineteenth
century settlement period and the associated decima-
tion and banishment of local Indians; the organized
labor struggles of the 1930s; and the modern environ-
mental activist movement. The latter also describes the
forestry regulations that allowed continued cutting in
spite of environmental laws, and highlights the legal
battles that led to the eventual protection of the
Headwaters Forest in 2000. The conclusion restates
the symbolic importance of these interrelated events,
123
1460
and emphasizes the prominent role of the redwood
timber wars in uniting environmental and labor
movements in the fight against globalization.
Although many interesting historical facts are
recounted in these chapters, this is not a history
book, nor a policy analysis. It is far from objective.
More importantly, the facts are difficult to extract
from the cumbersome, jargon-laden sociological
analyses that accompany each piece of historical
interest. As an example, from Chapter 2 (p. 73), I
re-read this sentence several times without having
more than a vague notion of its meaning:
Such an understanding is crucial for the linguis-
tic and communicative metaphors that social
theory uses for culture and society: the objective
order of institutions, encountered by every
individual as the structure of meaning-making
systems that mediate human engagement with
the world, functions not just as the repressive
and organizing, governing force of law but also
as the very condition of possibility for partici-
pation in social exchanges that constitute cul-
tural practice.
Of course, landscape ecologists and scientists in
general are certainly capable of generating incom-
prehensible texts (how many sociologists care about
interspersion-juxtaposition metrics, fractal dimen-
sions, or neutral landscapes?). The writing style in
this book, however, can only serve to strengthen the
disciplinary walls that partition the analysis and
understanding of important topics.
Pacific northwestern forests provided a setting for
the development of landscape ecology theory in the
context of timber management and conservation
planning for the Northern Spotted Owl and other
123
Landscape Ecol (2010) 25:1459–1460
species (e.g., Franklin and Forman 1987, Landscape
Ecology Volume 1, Issue 1). The redwood forests of
California’s north coast have received less treatment
within the field of landscape ecology, but they
comprise an intriguing landscape of superlatives for
ecologists. Ecologically rich, the human dimension
has often been ignored by landscape ecologists, except
as a hindrance to conservation goals. Thus it is
disappointing that this book, which provides that
human dimension, fails to integrate it with an ecolog-
ical perspective. In fact, the book is largely devoid of
ecological content. Aside from several mentions of the
forest’s most visible icons—redwoods, spotted owls,
marbled murrelets, and salmon—the book contains
very little about the ecological process and patterns are
of interest to landscape ecologists. And all of this is
condensed into the first two pages of the prologue.
Furthermore, the language is likely to turn off
scientists who bristle at the use of meaningless terms
like ‘‘planetary ecology’’ and ‘‘bio-zoological land-
scape’’ (and who may be left wondering about the
validity of many other compound and hyphenated
terms in the book).
I approached this book not just as a landscape
ecologist, but also as an environmentalist who, as a
college student, attended Earth First! rallies and
Maxxam protests, gathered signatures for the ‘‘For-
ests Forever’’ initiative, and met Darryl Cherney at
UCLA not long after the infamous car-bombing
event. So the events and ideas described in the book
were of significant interest to me. Even so, it was a
laborious read. This book may be suitable reading for
a graduate course on social movements, and redwood
forest ecologists may benefit from its treatment of the
region’s human history. But it is not a priority read
for most readers of this journal.